Cases of Time Slips

A white Ford pickup pulled up to cattle pasture near Ponca City, Oklahoma, in early Fall 1971, and stopped at a gate. Karl, Mark, and Gordon worked for cattle feed distributor and were sent to this remote area to pick up a feeder. What they found there has kept them silent for 41 years.

“We opened the gate, which was barbed wire with no lock, and entered,” Karl said. “We went on the property, which was covered with grass up to and over the hood of the truck.”

They drove through the tall grass to the tank that sat close to a red barn and got out of the truck.

“We realized the tank was almost half full and too heavy to load,” Karl said. “We decided to leave and drove around the red barn and we saw a large, two story white house, with no lights in front of us.”

The trio drove back to the cattle feed company and the boss said he’d drain the tank and they could pick it up tomorrow.

“We went to the location to retrieve the tank the next night,” Karl said. “This time we decided to go through the old white big house on the hill and brought our shotguns.”

They drove onto the property over the path they’d made through the grass the day before and loaded the tank. Then they pulled around the barn toward the house. What they saw burned into their memories.

“It was no longer there,” Karl said. “We walked up the hill where it stood and there were no signs of demolition, no foundation, nothing at all. What we all seemed to witness the night before was no longer there. We have talked to each other over the years but none of us can begin to explain this vision.”

Did these men witness a slip in time?

Time slips have been reported throughout history. English women vacationing in France in 1901 claimed they stepped into the French Revolution, and two English couples traveling in Spain in the 1970s stayed at an oddly archaic hotel that was simply gone on their return journey.

Physicists like Albert Einstein, Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking have all said time travel is theoretically possible; our science just can’t achieve it. But what if nature can?

The light in the sky shown white, far from the greens and reds Jake saw during the Aurora Borealis of 2004, visible in North America as far south as the lower Midwest. Jake, 15, stood outside his parents home in the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, around 10 p.m. 28 May, leaning against a truck and looking at the lights. He didn’t know his life was about to change.

He walked into the house to find he’d been outside an hour. “It took most of the night for me to tell my parents what happened, and most of the time I kept telling them that I thought the calendar was wrong, it should at least be after 2008,” he said. “To this day, my mother remembers bits of this, mainly because I looked at her and asked point blank, ‘Is the black man president?’”

What happened to Jake? Seizure? Psychological phenomena? Or did Jake accidentally take a brief, four-year step into 2008?

Jake’s slip is just one in a long line of stories from people who have brushed against a different time, such as RAF pilot Sir Victor Goddard who encountered airplanes in 1935 that didn’t exist until 1939, and a 100-year-old Swiss watch found in a Chinese Ming dynasty tomb. People may slip like this all the time.

Kell opened the door of his 1999 Chevrolet S-10 next to a convenience store gas pump in Springfield, Missouri, when a large man accosted him.

“As I left the gas station, some large melon-headed man dressed in a business suit yelled, ‘What year is it?’” Kell said.

The man stood at a spot Kell would have walked by when he left the store, but he hadn’t seen him. The man wore a dark black suit “with a rough fiber texture,” Kell said. “Along the lines of the things Teddy Roosevelt could wear.”

“What year is it?” the man yelled again.

The man was white, about 35 to 40 years old, clean-shaven, normal, but he’d asked an odd question. Kell answered it.

“Two-thousand three,” Kell told him.

The man’s face contorted in anger.

“What year is it?” he screamed at Kell.

“Again I said ‘2003.’”

The large man screamed the question one more time.

“I said ‘2003’ so he could hear me,” Kell said. “Then he quit asking.”

Kell glanced away from the man as he slid into his truck, but safely inside, Kell turned to get another look at him. The man was gone.

“He disappeared from the front of the gas station,” Kell said. In the seconds it took Kell to slip into his truck, the man simply vanished. Kell looked, but the man hadn’t stepped inside the store – the only place he could have gone in that short amount of time. He was just gone.

“These stories are not so rare as people think,” Kell said. “But the stories are so bizarre that I don’t think anyone would want to come foreword to tell it. Who would believe you?”

Jason Offutt is paranormal investigator, an author of several paranormal books such as “What Lurks Beyond,” “Darkness Walks: Shadow People Among us,” “Haunted Missouri,” and “Paranormal Missouri” and a teacher of journalism at Northwest Missouri State University.